AN anniversary in Australia’s country music history quietly passed this week.
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Tuesday marked 100 years since the birth of Tex Morton.
The Tex Morton story is of a talented man who came to Australia from New Zealand as a teenager, became a star and would later find success in the United States. Remind you of anyone? I’ll get to that later.
It was August 30, 1916, that Robert Lane - who would later adopt the stage name Tex Morton - was born in Nelson, near the northern coast of New Zealand’s South Island.
I first became aware of the man and the music via my father’s record collection when I was a child and remember being fascinated by the fact that the artist recognised as Australian country music’s first star was born in New Zealand.
The record collection included several Tex Morton albums, and I recall listening to rodeo songs such as Aristocrat and Mandrake, the uptempo Good Old Droving Days and the heartbreaking Letter Edged in Black.
Tex came to Australia as a teenager in the early 1930s to pursue his dream of a life in showbusiness, and in 1936 he recorded his first commercial records at Regal Zonophone’s Homebush studio.
Initially his style was similar to hillbilly music that was being recorded in America, but he was the first artist to perform bush ballads when he introduced uniquely Australian content into his lyrics.
He later ventured to America where for almost two decades he performed hypnotism shows as Dr Robert Morton across North America. During this time he broke the attendance record at New York’s Carnegie Hall.
While in the United States, the great showman also appeared on film, television and radio.
In 1959 he returned to Australia and continued performing, until his last show at the 1982 Tamworth Country Music Festival, in front of 5000 fans.
Let’s go back one year, and we will find the artist whose story reminds me of Tex Morton.
It was the Tamworth Country Music Festival in 1981, that a teenager named Keith Urban won several talent quests.
From Tex Morton’s hometown of Nelson, you need to head a little more than 1000 kilometres north to find Whangarei, a city of more than 50,000 people.
It was here Urban was born on October 26, 1967, but unlike Morton Urban was still a child when he came to Australia with his parents.
Like Morton he would go to have success on Australia’s country music scene, before finding success in the United States following the trail blazed by Morton more than 40 years earlier.
After Tex died in July 1983, he was returned to New Zealand where he was buried in his hometown of Nelson. There his epitaph reads: ‘A millionaire in the experience of life’.